eresting illustration of this. This is partly
because the influence of leaders is dependent on their social
status as well as their personal qualities. The opinions of
inventors and big business men are taken with eagerness and
credulity even when touching matters outside their own field.
A man is made, as it were, _ipso facto_, a leader, by being rich,
powerful, of a socially distinguished family, or the director of
a large industry, although he may have, besides, qualities of
leadership that do not depend on his social position.

MAN PITIES AND PROTECTS WEAK AND SUFFERING THINGS. Nearly
all human beings exhibit a tendency to protect weak and
suffering things. This impulse is closely related to, and
probably has its origin in the parental instinct, more common, of
course, in women than in men. The feeling of affectionate
pity and the impulse to rescue from pain are most intense
when the distressed thing is a child, and particularly one's
own. One of the most poignant instances extant is the speech
of Andromache, one of the Trojan women in Euripides's play
of that name, to her child who is about to be slain by the
Greeks:

And none to pity thee!... Thou little thing,
That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling
All round thy neck! Beloved; can it be
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
And fostered; all the weary nights wherethrough
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;
Not ever again. Put up thine arms and climb
About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips...
O ye have found an anguish that outstrips
All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks!
Why will ye slay this innocent that seeks
No wrong?...[1]

[Footnote 1: Euripides: ''Trojan Women'' (Gilbert Murray translation), p. 49.]

But the "tender emotion" as McDougall calls it, is aroused
by other children than one's own, and by others than children.
It is called out particularly by things that are by nature
helpless and delicate, but may be aroused by adults who are
placed in situations where they are suffering and powerless.
Samson, shorn of his strength, has been a traditional occasion
for pathos. The sick, the bereaved, the down-and-outers, the
failures, the forlorn and broken-hearted, call out in most men
an impulse to befriend and protect. Those who have been
dealt with unjustly or severely by their associates and society
and who have no redress, the poverty-stricken, the cr